Thanks, Ed. We just need a little time to socialize this newcomer.
Herb
-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar on behalf of Edward Vavra
Sent: Tue 2/28/2006 4:43 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: "work for" plus adverb clause
Herb,
I admire your patience.
Ed
>>> [log in to unmask] 2/28/2006 4:08:12 PM >>>
Eduard,
Let me try this again.
"Grammatical" has at least two widely accepted meanings. In
linguistics
it's concept used to distinguish between sentences a native speaker
would recognized as possible in the native language and those that he
or
she would not so recognize. By this common linguistic usage, your
first
sentence is clearly ungrammatical. You may not like this definition,
but it is one of some linguistic importance and considerable utility.
The second sense refers to judgments people make as to what seems to
them to be appropriate usage in formal standard English. Having
taught
English for most of my life at this point, I have learned that these
judgments vary considerably, based on age, region, experience with
editing and correcting, and simply personal preference. And very
often
these judgments are made with little sensitivity to context.
Here's an example that some educated speakers of English, including
colleagues and students in my English department, have told me is
ungrammatical because the use of "it" in it is redundant.
Hillary simply hates it that she's not considered a liberal.
Now, one may also say
Hillary simply hates that she's not considered a liberal.
The difference is that the extraposed structure (with "it"), a term
introduced, I believe, by Otto Jespersen to describe this sort of
construction, is used when the speaker/writer wishes to emphasize the
newness or contrastiveness of the that-clause.
I don't know how you would judge these two sentences, but clearly
there
are skilled editors and language teachers who would come down on
either
side, as I have found with my colleagues.
There are contexts, perhaps, where the "for" of the example we've been
discussing would feel redundant, in which case I too would encourage a
student writer to remove it, but I would be delighted if my student
had
a sufficiently subtle sense of language to tell the difference and to
know when it WOULD be appropriate to use it.
In short, I would not consider the presence or absence of "for" in
that
sentence to be a matter of grammaticality but rather a matter of
appropriateness to context. Redundancy is a bit too coarse a measure
for choices like this.
Herb
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